So cynical...while it has limited utility, the decision is not useless. Police tend to use surveillance techniques and police procedures which procure evidence that can be used to obtain a conviction; if the Act is unconstitutional, evidence obtained under its provisions is inadmissible in court. Knowing that, police agencies will be less likely to use powers in accord with those provisions, since anything that they gather using it will be useless in a court of law.
Yes I know police do go off the rails--"Don't taze me, bro!"--but at least a ruling of this sort curbs one of the worst abuses that can emanate from inappropriate police investigative conduct, namely convictions in a court of law.
Hating your government for no good reason is nearly as silly as loving it on the same basis. I would say one should be rationally engaged and emotionally disinterested in their government unless and until that government unduly interferes in your life or perpetrates some act you consider to be unjust.
While the posters above hit two of the most important ones, with Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey, I'd also add (and I'm kind of shocked that it hasn't yet been mentioned here) Deus Ex. Talk about intricate plot! Also, the Myst games get an honorable mention, though with those (especially the first) you get more of a sense of being an intruder in an already-passed story than a part of one yourself.
The idea that you cannot take photos, cam, or audio recordings of an event for which you are present (and so presumably recording into your memory with your own eyes and ears) is quite new, and quite bizarre. I'm not saying its wrong, necessarily, just not as obviously right as you are making it out to be.
Touche. Nobody's perfect.;) On the other hand, I'd say that vitriolic temper is a little less sleazy than blithely associating a statement with someone that was never made or even inferred by them.
The B. Russell quote is quite apropos. The sentence right before the one of mine you quoted: "I do sympathize with those who are placed in a situation where they honestly don't know what the right thing to do is, or know but cannot actualize it for want of resources or because doing so would exact a heavier cost." Obviously the world is fraught with uncertainty and ambiguity; we can honestly disagree about what is the right thing to do or how to do it, or fail to perceive it when it occurs. What I am specifically criticizing are those who believe in a thing but will avoid responsibility for that belief by not acting upon it, claiming it is either unimportant or someone else's responsibility, when their own beliefs would normally indicate otherwise. I also claim (a little more controversially) that not all of morality is relative. For example, standing by and watching a healthy non-suicidal person die when you have the power to save them I think is as close as one could come to an objective moral violation.
Critically, one need not be certain in order to act. Reservations and doubts are part of being human; this should not paralyze us from action. B. Russell was not advocating that because fools are so certain of themselves that we should therefore refrain from acting and thus be wise. It is also possible to be too hesitant, too contemplative...some actions and some consequences (most in fact) have a time limit, a window for possible action. Some err one way and some err the other. However, like I said earlier, in my admittedly subjective experience I have found more harm come from a hesitance to act when the moral imperatives are clear than from rash action when the moral imperatives are not clear. I'm sure others have had different experiences.
Ok...? You have an odd way of connecting dots. There are many categories and many shades of participation in each category. I am not perfect in this or any other regard (far from it!). However, I do try to get involved when I deem it likely that my involvement will do more good than harm, and am critical of those who deem the effect of their possible involvement likewise but nevertheless don't get involved because they couldn't be bothered or because they minimize the importance of either the problem or the people the problem affects.
Also, a little nit, you described a trinary state, not a binary one. Larger nits: Your description of the second state is inaccurate; it is neither laziness nor carelessness, but cynicism and/or a lack of empathy that I identified as being the problems at issue. And I never indicated in any of my posts that I believed that I was alone in attempting to occupy the third so-described state. Sleazy way to attack, though.
It would not. The US could get involved only if that person were being held by the US Government. After all, the Writ of Habeas Corpus only applies against the entity who is holding the petitioning individual. If the Iranian Government were holding an Iranian citizen, a petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus by that person to the US Government would not be efficacious, because it is not the US Government holding the petitioner. All the Constitutional language requires is that the US Government must not fail to allow petitions for the Writ from people that it is holding, except in times of invasion.
Jurisdictional shenanigans aside, one might argue that an Iraqi citizen being held in an Iraqi prison may have a Habeas claim in the US because the US occupies Iraq militarily and the Iraqi government's ability to exercise sovereign powers such as detaining people rests squarely upon the US' complicity and participation.
LOL. If every English teacher was really serious about expanding students' vocabularies, they'd have kids read sci-fi (esp. Heinlein and Asimov) and listen to select punk rock and metal bands (Tool, Henry Rollins, Bad Religion, et al.). But, for the most part, they aren't, and they don't.
Your comment would also mean that all our federal laws apply elsewhere in the world and therefore we should go about enforcing them to insure "rights" for everyone. I think that's a lovely idea, but I have a strange feeling not too many other countries will agree with us on that.
Not at all. It only means that when the US acts vis a vis a person, it must respect the right to petition for the Writ. The Constitution describes what the US Government may or may not do. Thus, under his entirely defensible reading, since the US Government is forbidden from suspending petitions for the writ except under very specific conditions, that prohibition applies to the US Government regardless of who the party is applying for the writ.
You are distorting what he wrote. He is arguing that the US Government is bound by the Constitution to not violate Habeas Corpus rights of anyone it may interact with (and I would probably add the caveat under its territorial jurisdiction). So if the US is occupying Iraq, then it is feasible to argue that it would be illegal for the US to deny access to the Great Writ to occupied Iraqis insofar as they would have cause to apply for one from a US court. Likewise, a British national living and working on US soil would, due to being under the jurisdiction of the US laws, also have the right to petition for relief. If the US Congress or any other organ of the US Government denied access to the Writ, they would be acting ultra vires, and illegally.
What he is *not* saying is that as a result the US is required to guarantee that all people everywhere have recourse to the Writ of Habeas Corpus; that would be silly. It is not that the US Constitution requires that the US guarantee that an Iranian citizen is able to petition the Iranian government for the writ. It is only that if that same Iranian found him/herself in the position of interacting with the US government, the US may not deny him/her the right to petition for the Writ.
Now, how the Constitution is written and how it has come to be interpreted by authorities have never exactly been similar, but that's a whole other argument. As it stands in the text, his position is defensible, and you are distorting it into a caricature.
Point on the vitriol. I took a cranky pill this morning.:) However, in my personal experience (anecdotal to you as it must be), more unnecessary suffering comes from people refusing to take a stand or help others or give a damn in general, than ever came from the original proximate source of the problem. Often, problems are easier to deal with at the proximal source than when they have been compounded by time and inaction. I do sympathize with those who are placed in a situation where they honestly don't know what the right thing to do is, or know but cannot actualize it for want of resources or because doing so would exact a heavier cost. I even can, depending greatly on the circumstances, even grudgingly respect those who recognize problems but have made the conscious choice to not get involved.
However, I have no patience or respect for those who choose to ignore the existence of problems either by pretending they don't exist or pretending they don't matter (acts of bad faith made to avoid confronting the conscious moral choice), which by extension asserts that the people so affected also do not matter when it comes right down to it. That is a self-deception which has the added demerit of also hurting others.
I apologized to him for my reaction. However, what I was reacting to was not what side he was on, but rather his assertion that since it only affected a few people (that presumably did not include him), that it was therefore unworthy of attention.
Or perhaps, and I haven't checked, but the post I responded to might have been modded into oblivion, in which case it might appear I was responding to the post above his instead, which I was not.
Empathy is the key. That was my whole point; empathy is the ability to care about others and their plights because of the unique and under-used human ability to simulate what it might feel like to be the person that is suffering. People lacking empathy don't care, and so don't act to minimize the suffering of others, saying it is not their business or it doesn't affect them, among the more popular rationalizations.
And, by-the-by, while much of morality is up for grabs, much of it isn't. One can recognize the gray areas of ethical discourse without becoming a frothy-mouthed relativist. One might especially argue over how best to help; sometimes, as many Libertarians tirelessly point out, hand-outs and unvarnished charity is often not the best approach. There is a wide gulf, however, between not knowing what to do and not caring. It is, I think, relatively uncontroversial that helping the Kitty Genoveses of the world would be a good thing, and the hesitancy of people to do so is what allows tragedies like that to occur. And while most examples of injustice or needless suffering do not rise to the level of murder, that doesn't make them unimportant or less worthy of attention.
True enough, but exceptions to restraint of trade (and please any lawyer stop me if I'm wrong) usually revolve around the restraint benefiting both parties and also the general public interests. Housing I imagine could qualify as otherwise a university's presence could have a nasty impact on local housing markets. On the other hand, one might hard-pressed to see a public policy benefit for bundling book sales...a book is a book is a book no matter where you buy it from.
Rhetorical subtlety must be lost on you. The sentence immediately following the "your fault" sentence adequately establishes the context for those who bother to read; i.e. the large class of people (of whom the GP is assumed to be a member, due to his comment) who sit by and do nothing while bad things happen to others are to blame for the endemic perpetuity of human-generated evil. Without their obsequious and/or cynical lack of action, people bent on doing harm would be comparatively powerless and/or ineffectual.
But I suppose some folks need the dots connected for them.
...my cynical guess is that the campus bookstore is going to go to the University president and lobby to have the cost of a year's new textbooks automatically added to tuition, so that the students have no choice but to buy straight from them no matter the cost.
Wouldn't that run afoul of some Restraint of Trade or Bundling regulations?
I suppose you're one of those "It doesn't matter until it happens to me" folks.
You know all those problems in the world? They're your fault. After all, maleficent people are a small minority; the only reason malignant evils persist are because of the indifference of the rest.
Too harsh? Maybe, but people like you really tick me off.
No, it does happen in most jurisdictions in the States...but while for PR it's to "get a cop to hesitate before using it on others", in reality as a tactical matter hesitation is the last reaction they would want from an officer. No, the real reason is to give the officer an appreciation of how incapacitating the chemical is so that they can use it to its greatest effectiveness.
There are departments that encourage use of force, disrespect of rights, disregard of oversight, and disdain for civilians, and there are those that don't. The culture of individual police departments, their leadership, and the moral caliber of the rank and file officers (pretty much in that order) are more of a determinant of good behavior than any training regiment.
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So cynical...while it has limited utility, the decision is not useless. Police tend to use surveillance techniques and police procedures which procure evidence that can be used to obtain a conviction; if the Act is unconstitutional, evidence obtained under its provisions is inadmissible in court. Knowing that, police agencies will be less likely to use powers in accord with those provisions, since anything that they gather using it will be useless in a court of law.
Yes I know police do go off the rails--"Don't taze me, bro!"--but at least a ruling of this sort curbs one of the worst abuses that can emanate from inappropriate police investigative conduct, namely convictions in a court of law.
Hating your government for no good reason is nearly as silly as loving it on the same basis. I would say one should be rationally engaged and emotionally disinterested in their government unless and until that government unduly interferes in your life or perpetrates some act you consider to be unjust.
But maybe that's just me.
While the posters above hit two of the most important ones, with Grim Fandango and The Longest Journey, I'd also add (and I'm kind of shocked that it hasn't yet been mentioned here) Deus Ex. Talk about intricate plot! Also, the Myst games get an honorable mention, though with those (especially the first) you get more of a sense of being an intruder in an already-passed story than a part of one yourself.
The idea that you cannot take photos, cam, or audio recordings of an event for which you are present (and so presumably recording into your memory with your own eyes and ears) is quite new, and quite bizarre. I'm not saying its wrong, necessarily, just not as obviously right as you are making it out to be.
Touche. Nobody's perfect. ;) On the other hand, I'd say that vitriolic temper is a little less sleazy than blithely associating a statement with someone that was never made or even inferred by them.
The B. Russell quote is quite apropos. The sentence right before the one of mine you quoted: "I do sympathize with those who are placed in a situation where they honestly don't know what the right thing to do is, or know but cannot actualize it for want of resources or because doing so would exact a heavier cost." Obviously the world is fraught with uncertainty and ambiguity; we can honestly disagree about what is the right thing to do or how to do it, or fail to perceive it when it occurs. What I am specifically criticizing are those who believe in a thing but will avoid responsibility for that belief by not acting upon it, claiming it is either unimportant or someone else's responsibility, when their own beliefs would normally indicate otherwise. I also claim (a little more controversially) that not all of morality is relative. For example, standing by and watching a healthy non-suicidal person die when you have the power to save them I think is as close as one could come to an objective moral violation.
Critically, one need not be certain in order to act. Reservations and doubts are part of being human; this should not paralyze us from action. B. Russell was not advocating that because fools are so certain of themselves that we should therefore refrain from acting and thus be wise. It is also possible to be too hesitant, too contemplative...some actions and some consequences (most in fact) have a time limit, a window for possible action. Some err one way and some err the other. However, like I said earlier, in my admittedly subjective experience I have found more harm come from a hesitance to act when the moral imperatives are clear than from rash action when the moral imperatives are not clear. I'm sure others have had different experiences.
Ok...? You have an odd way of connecting dots. There are many categories and many shades of participation in each category. I am not perfect in this or any other regard (far from it!). However, I do try to get involved when I deem it likely that my involvement will do more good than harm, and am critical of those who deem the effect of their possible involvement likewise but nevertheless don't get involved because they couldn't be bothered or because they minimize the importance of either the problem or the people the problem affects.
Also, a little nit, you described a trinary state, not a binary one. Larger nits: Your description of the second state is inaccurate; it is neither laziness nor carelessness, but cynicism and/or a lack of empathy that I identified as being the problems at issue. And I never indicated in any of my posts that I believed that I was alone in attempting to occupy the third so-described state. Sleazy way to attack, though.
It would not. The US could get involved only if that person were being held by the US Government. After all, the Writ of Habeas Corpus only applies against the entity who is holding the petitioning individual. If the Iranian Government were holding an Iranian citizen, a petition for a Writ of Habeas Corpus by that person to the US Government would not be efficacious, because it is not the US Government holding the petitioner. All the Constitutional language requires is that the US Government must not fail to allow petitions for the Writ from people that it is holding, except in times of invasion.
Jurisdictional shenanigans aside, one might argue that an Iraqi citizen being held in an Iraqi prison may have a Habeas claim in the US because the US occupies Iraq militarily and the Iraqi government's ability to exercise sovereign powers such as detaining people rests squarely upon the US' complicity and participation.
LOL. If every English teacher was really serious about expanding students' vocabularies, they'd have kids read sci-fi (esp. Heinlein and Asimov) and listen to select punk rock and metal bands (Tool, Henry Rollins, Bad Religion, et al.). But, for the most part, they aren't, and they don't.
Your comment would also mean that all our federal laws apply elsewhere in the world and therefore we should go about enforcing them to insure "rights" for everyone. I think that's a lovely idea, but I have a strange feeling not too many other countries will agree with us on that.
Not at all. It only means that when the US acts vis a vis a person, it must respect the right to petition for the Writ. The Constitution describes what the US Government may or may not do. Thus, under his entirely defensible reading, since the US Government is forbidden from suspending petitions for the writ except under very specific conditions, that prohibition applies to the US Government regardless of who the party is applying for the writ.
You are distorting what he wrote. He is arguing that the US Government is bound by the Constitution to not violate Habeas Corpus rights of anyone it may interact with (and I would probably add the caveat under its territorial jurisdiction). So if the US is occupying Iraq, then it is feasible to argue that it would be illegal for the US to deny access to the Great Writ to occupied Iraqis insofar as they would have cause to apply for one from a US court. Likewise, a British national living and working on US soil would, due to being under the jurisdiction of the US laws, also have the right to petition for relief. If the US Congress or any other organ of the US Government denied access to the Writ, they would be acting ultra vires, and illegally.
What he is *not* saying is that as a result the US is required to guarantee that all people everywhere have recourse to the Writ of Habeas Corpus; that would be silly. It is not that the US Constitution requires that the US guarantee that an Iranian citizen is able to petition the Iranian government for the writ. It is only that if that same Iranian found him/herself in the position of interacting with the US government, the US may not deny him/her the right to petition for the Writ.
Now, how the Constitution is written and how it has come to be interpreted by authorities have never exactly been similar, but that's a whole other argument. As it stands in the text, his position is defensible, and you are distorting it into a caricature.
Point on the vitriol. I took a cranky pill this morning. :) However, in my personal experience (anecdotal to you as it must be), more unnecessary suffering comes from people refusing to take a stand or help others or give a damn in general, than ever came from the original proximate source of the problem. Often, problems are easier to deal with at the proximal source than when they have been compounded by time and inaction. I do sympathize with those who are placed in a situation where they honestly don't know what the right thing to do is, or know but cannot actualize it for want of resources or because doing so would exact a heavier cost. I even can, depending greatly on the circumstances, even grudgingly respect those who recognize problems but have made the conscious choice to not get involved.
However, I have no patience or respect for those who choose to ignore the existence of problems either by pretending they don't exist or pretending they don't matter (acts of bad faith made to avoid confronting the conscious moral choice), which by extension asserts that the people so affected also do not matter when it comes right down to it. That is a self-deception which has the added demerit of also hurting others.
I apologized to him for my reaction. However, what I was reacting to was not what side he was on, but rather his assertion that since it only affected a few people (that presumably did not include him), that it was therefore unworthy of attention.
Or perhaps, and I haven't checked, but the post I responded to might have been modded into oblivion, in which case it might appear I was responding to the post above his instead, which I was not.
Empathy is the key. That was my whole point; empathy is the ability to care about others and their plights because of the unique and under-used human ability to simulate what it might feel like to be the person that is suffering. People lacking empathy don't care, and so don't act to minimize the suffering of others, saying it is not their business or it doesn't affect them, among the more popular rationalizations.
And, by-the-by, while much of morality is up for grabs, much of it isn't. One can recognize the gray areas of ethical discourse without becoming a frothy-mouthed relativist. One might especially argue over how best to help; sometimes, as many Libertarians tirelessly point out, hand-outs and unvarnished charity is often not the best approach. There is a wide gulf, however, between not knowing what to do and not caring. It is, I think, relatively uncontroversial that helping the Kitty Genoveses of the world would be a good thing, and the hesitancy of people to do so is what allows tragedies like that to occur. And while most examples of injustice or needless suffering do not rise to the level of murder, that doesn't make them unimportant or less worthy of attention.
The problem with humor is that it has to be funny...You weren't funny. Hence, not humor.
Niska: Mr. Reynolds? You died, Mr. Reynolds.
Malcolm: It seemed like the thing to do.
Any yet...how much do you want to bet that the composition of the '08 congress is going to be by-and-large identical to the '06 class?
That is eminently more defensible. Sorry for my reaction being directed at you.
True enough, but exceptions to restraint of trade (and please any lawyer stop me if I'm wrong) usually revolve around the restraint benefiting both parties and also the general public interests. Housing I imagine could qualify as otherwise a university's presence could have a nasty impact on local housing markets. On the other hand, one might hard-pressed to see a public policy benefit for bundling book sales...a book is a book is a book no matter where you buy it from.
Rhetorical subtlety must be lost on you. The sentence immediately following the "your fault" sentence adequately establishes the context for those who bother to read; i.e. the large class of people (of whom the GP is assumed to be a member, due to his comment) who sit by and do nothing while bad things happen to others are to blame for the endemic perpetuity of human-generated evil. Without their obsequious and/or cynical lack of action, people bent on doing harm would be comparatively powerless and/or ineffectual.
But I suppose some folks need the dots connected for them.
Wouldn't that run afoul of some Restraint of Trade or Bundling regulations?
I suppose you're one of those "It doesn't matter until it happens to me" folks.
You know all those problems in the world? They're your fault. After all, maleficent people are a small minority; the only reason malignant evils persist are because of the indifference of the rest.
Too harsh? Maybe, but people like you really tick me off.
No, it does happen in most jurisdictions in the States...but while for PR it's to "get a cop to hesitate before using it on others", in reality as a tactical matter hesitation is the last reaction they would want from an officer. No, the real reason is to give the officer an appreciation of how incapacitating the chemical is so that they can use it to its greatest effectiveness.
There are departments that encourage use of force, disrespect of rights, disregard of oversight, and disdain for civilians, and there are those that don't. The culture of individual police departments, their leadership, and the moral caliber of the rank and file officers (pretty much in that order) are more of a determinant of good behavior than any training regiment.
Why are you apologizing? You nailed it in one.
You get extra points (or at least you should) for the Next Gen reference. Chain of Command, wasn't it? ;)